Artificial intelligence is an area of study that attempts to create intelligent agents, which perceive an environment and take actions in accordance with their perceptions. A primary objective of artificial intelligence is to make these agents reason and behave like humans in order to achieve the best possible outcome. To accomplish this objective, agents are created that are capable of natural language processing, knowledge representation, automated reasoning, and machine learning.
Specifically, artificially intelligent agents can be anything that can be viewed as perceiving its environment through sensors and acting upon the perceived environment through actuators. The input to the agent may be perceptual at any given instant or a complete history of everything the agent has perceived.
Agents can be rational by perceiving an environment and going though a sequence of states to obtain a desired outcome based on the perceived environment. These states may be updated so as to obtain the desired outcome even as the environment changes. For example, an environment may be a chess board. An artificially intelligent agent may perceive where the chess pieces are on the board and perform a number of calculations to determine what action should be taken to ultimately check mate the opponent. Based on these calculations, the agent may perform an action, e.g., using an actuator. In response, the opponent may perform an action. The agent can sense the changed environment that is brought on by the opponent's action and calculate the next move based on changed environment.